Feeding is a term that generally refers to the act of dying to the enemy and thus giving them kill rewards repeatedly and:
- Purposelessly, due to poor skill and risk/threat assessment of the player.
- Deliberately, in order to grief the ally team, also called "inting".
A player who is feeding is said to be a "feeder". By total contrast, a player whose champion has received a lot of resource advantages from the enemy team (which includes last-hits, 
monsters, and kills) and is thus able to carry the game, is said to be "fed".
When a champion is repeatedly slain, they must also subsequently give up some game control and power. For example, it enables the feeder's lane opponent to freely damage and destroy 
turrets, as if no opposition ever existed, or cause a disadvantage in teamfights due to less manpower on the feeder's team. The enemy champions that have been fed from the feeder may eventually be at a great advantage, as they have been freely given resources that they can use to overpower the feeder and their team in duels, skirmishes, and teamfights.
Purposeless feeding[]
Lower-skill players lack experience and tend to die more often and more easily to more skilled players. This is due to their lack of game knowledge on match-ups and what actually constitutes a game threat, and specifically a lethal threat to their own 
champion in the game. The less experienced player may position their champion too close to the enemy and get punished for it repeatedly. A regular occurrence in the case of beginner-level players is not retaliating to the enemy's attacks at all, and thus letting an enemy hit and kill them freely. From a different perspective, a player may feed due to being targeted by an enemy that has become fed by a different player and too powerful to overcome.
Outside of strategical contexts this may also refer to a player losing focus during a match and it resulting in deaths. A more common term that is used in higher-stakes modes such as ranked is "being on auto-pilot", a metaphor for playing purely by muscle memory and ignoring to adapt to the circumstances of the current game.
Due to the relative nature of ranked systems in competitive videogames, this type of feeding may take place potentially at any level of play, although at higher levels it happens much less frequently. At apex levels of play, where the game is more convoluted and players simply have and present way more game knowledge within a given game, it is a notable achievement when a player is able to one-on-one become fed off of their enemy role counterpart specifically — it implies one of the highest and most crushing forms of role dominance for the winning player.
Deliberate feeding[]
Inting is one potential form of griefing, or sabotaging the game for the player's own team. This behavior is always caused by external psychological factors, such as an extreme response to frustration within a game, while some may consider it enjoyable to grief games by intentionally feeding.
Regardless of a player's reason for intentionally feeding, it is important to note that this behavior may be reported and is heavily punishable per League of Legends' Code of Conduct.[1]
Trivia[]
- The term "feeding" stems from one of the main definitions of the word "feed"; to gain nourishment by consuming food. In this sense, the player is being fed (gains resources in-game) from enemy champions, who are in turn the ones giving the food (offering away the resources).
- During earlier Ranked seasons, assigned roles in the old Draft mode did not exist (roles were not chosen or determined before champion select). Players had to call their role in chat, and other players had to respect call order. A player calling "(role) or feed", often in full capital letters, would imply a bad-tempered player who does not respect any potential or previous calls of other players in the lobby. Frequently, the player who sent this message would grief champion select picks or the game, if they did not get the role they wanted. The phrase has largely fallen out of usage due to the introduction of assigned roles from Season Six onward in all permanent
Summoner's Rift queues, and subsequent improvements have solved the issue of role choice in competitive modes to a large extent. The Blind Pick queue (which was removed in patch V13.22) had also used role-calling to form teams, as assigning roles was never available in it since its inception (before the game's release).
